Mind's eye
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Mary Hargood could much more easily picture to herself Zenobia in chains, Medea hanging over her cauldron, Regulus surveying his torture - cask, or Jason charming the dragon, than bring before her mind's eye a living landscape of ..."--Progress and Prejudice (1854) by Catherine Gore |
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A mental image is an experience that significantly resembles the experience of perceiving some object, event, or scene, but that occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses (McKellar, 1957; Richardson,1969; Finke, 1989; Thomas, 2003). The nature of these experiences, what makes them possible, and their function (if any) have long been subjects of research and controversy in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and, more recently, neuroscience. As contemporary researchers use the expression, mental images (or mental imagery) can occur in any sense mode, so that we may experience auditory images (Reisberg, 1992), olfactory images (Bensafi et al., 2003), and so forth. However, the vast majority of philosophical and scientific investigations of the topic focus upon visual mental imagery. It is often assumed (e.g., by Aristotle: On the Soul III.3 428a) that, like humans, many types of animal are capable of experiencing mental images. However, owing to the fundamentally subjective nature of the phenomenon, there is little evidence either for or against this view.
Philosophers such as Berkeley, and Hume, and early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt and James, understood ideas in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that images function as mental representations (or mental models), playing an important role in memory and thinking.
Philosophical ideas about mental images
Mental images are an important topic in classical and modern philosophy, as they are central to the study of knowledge. In the Republic, book VII, Plato uses the metaphor of a prisoner in a cave, bound and unable to move, sitting with his back to a fire and watching the shadows cast on the wall in front of him by people carrying objects behind his back. The objects that they are carrying are representations of real things in the world. The prisoner, explains Socrates, is like a human being making mental images from the sense data that he experiences.
More recently, Bishop George Berkeley has proposed similar ideas in his theory of idealism. Berkeley stated that reality is equivalent to mental images — our mental images are not a copy of another material reality, but that reality itself. Berkeley, however, sharply distinguished between the images that he considered to constitute the external world, and the images of individual imagination. According to Berkeley, only the latter are considered "mental imagery" in the contemporary sense of the term.
David Deutsch addresses Johnson's objection to idealism in The Fabric of Reality when he states that if we judge the value of our mental images of the world by the quality and quantity of the sense data that they can explain, then the most valuable mental image — or theory — that we currently have is that the world has a real independent existence and that humans have successfully evolved by building up and adapting patterns of mental images to explain it. This is an important idea in scientific thought.
Critics of scientific realism ask how the inner perception of mental images actually occurs. This is sometimes called the "homunculus problem" (see also the mind's eye). The problem is similar to asking how the images you see on a computer screen exist in the memory of the computer. To scientific materialism, mental images and the perception of them must be brain-states. According to critics, scientific realists cannot explain where the images and their perceiver exist in the brain. To use the analogy of the computer screen, these critics argue that cognitive science and psychology has been unsuccessful in identifying either the component in the brain (i.e. "hardware") or the mental processes that store these images (i.e. "software").
See also
- Aphantasia (condition whereby people can't think with mental images at all)
- Animal cognition
- Cognition
- Creative visualization
- Fantasy (psychology)
- Fantasy prone personality
- Guided imagery
- Imagination
- Mental content
- Mental event
- Mental representation
- Mental rotation
- Mind
- Motor imagery
- Spatial ability
- Visual space
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The phrase "mind's eye" refers to the human ability for visualization, i.e., for the experiencing of visual mental imagery; in other words, one's ability to "see" things with the mind.
See also
- Mental image
- Philosophy of perception
- Subjective character of experience
- Third eye
- Binding problem
- Visual perception
- Nous
Reinhart Kruizinga Homan · 1868
Wij moeten dus vragen : op welke wijze doet het geestesoog eene waarneming ? Wanneer ik mijn zinnelijk oog sluit , neemt mijn geestesoog dan nog iets waar , b.v. boomen , huizen , menschen , enz . ? Neen ; de boomen , huizen enz . zelve ...
Leek en schriftgeleerde
Sytze Frederik Willem Roorda van Eysinga · 1859
... het is het uitsteken van het geestesoog dat God aanschouwt , het is eene vruchtelooze poging om door de oogen van een ... hetwelk door alle duisternis heen nog in ons eigen geestesoog dringt ; maar ofschoon het onmogelijk is om dat ...
... mededeelt . van Is de openbaring in CHRISTUS de grondslag van het Christendom , wij hebben ook eene aanwijzing noodig , wat er in CHRISTUS geopenbaard is , eene Christelijke leer , die ons het geestesoog voor die openbaring opent .
J. Witkop · 1849
Bij de eersten wordt traagheid van geest , bij de tweeden dwaling en vooroordeel , bij de laatsten aardsche zin gevonden , die het geestesoog verhinderen om de waarheid te zien , te erkennen en te beleven .
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Pieter Harmen Witkamp
Bekoorlijke tafereelen ontrollen zich voor onzen blik , en daarnevens verrijzen voor ons geestesoog de verrukkelijkste beelden , waarin al de weelde , al de heerlijkheid van het schoone jaargetijde opdoemt .
Het belang der Kerk voor Evangelische christenen zielkundig ...books.google.be › books
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Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Tischer
Want de mensch heeft , zoo als wij zagen , zeer twee geestesoogen , als hij i wee ligchaamsoogen heeft . Één geestesoog voor de zigtbare , zinnelijke wereld , het andere voor de on . zigtbare , bovenzinnelijke .
Catharina Felicia Rees · 1880
t Was niet het schijnsel van de zon , mijn geestesoog kon het niet opvangen , maar ' t was een soort van electrisch licht , dat den geheelen omtrek en ook mijzelf begon te verzilveren . Heerlijke natuurtooneelen verkwikten mij en wat ...
